Because without a third argument split will discard empty trailing fields which, as soon as you chomp away the newline, you have four of.

I hope this is helpful.

Got it. _Now_ it seems sooo obvious :)

Many thanks!

Krambambuli
---

split(/pat/, $s, -1) is the same as split(/pat/, $s) except trailing fields aren't discarded.

This is a good and concise answer.

See split. Most likely you want split /\t/, $_, 8 if you always want 8 columns.

I don't know the exact number of fields, and I do not want the newline in the last element.

So I decided to chomp _after_ the split:

@x = split(...)
chomp $x[-1];
[download]

Thanks!

Krambambuli
---

If you use a negative number for the third argument of split you will get the same results for both cases:

$ perl -e'
my $line ="A\tB\tC\tD\t\t\t\t\n";

print "Test string line: $line";

print "Split without chomp: ";
count_fields( $line );

print "Split _after_ chomp: ";
chomp $line;
count_fields( $line );

exit 0;

sub count_fields {
    my ($line) = @_;

    my @x = split /\t/, $line, -1;

    my $count = @x;

    print "$count fields.\n";
}
'
Test string line: A     B       C       D
Split without chomp: 8 fields.
Split _after_ chomp: 8 fields.
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For clarity, add

use Data::Dumper;
print Data::Dumper->new([\@x])->Indent(0)->Useqq(1)->Dump, "\n";
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Split without chomp: 8 fields.
$VAR1 = ["A","B","C","D","","","","\n"];

Split _after_ chomp: 4 fields.
$VAR1 = ["A","B","C","D"];
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#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $line ="A\tB\tC\tD\t\t\t\t\n";

print "Test string line: $line";

print "Split without chomp: ";
my @x=count_fields( $line );
check_for_null_elements(@x);

print "Split _after_ chomp: ";
chomp $line;
@x=count_fields( $line );
check_for_null_elements(@x);

exit;

sub check_for_null_elements {
   foreach my $element (@_){
      print "Empty element found\n" if ($element eq "");
   }
}

sub count_fields {
   my ($line) = shift;
   my @x = split( /\t+/, $line);
   my $count = @x;
   print "$count fields.\n";
   return (@x);
}
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